As it pertains to church discipline, how should a church evaluate moral controversies where there’s not an immediate or obvious answer? For example, should a church discipline a member who owns a payday lending business? To answer this question, churches and their leaders need to engage in ethical triage, understanding why our moral witness as local church members is essential to our credibility as Christians.
ETHICAL TRIAGE
Albert Mohler coined the term theological triage in 2005. As Mohler argued, Christians need to understand that belief in the bodily resurrection is essential to the Christian faith while issues like the mode of baptism or the millennium are not. First-order issues are essential; second- and third-order issues, while important, don’t place anyone beyond the pale of orthodoxy.
Similarly, Christians need to be capable of engaging in ethical triage. We need to be able to differentiate between moral principles deduced clearly from Scripture and those that are not as clear. We need to identify moral issues that are both essential for Christians to believe and practice and those that are non-essential but still nonetheless important. Ethical triage helps us determine whether hierarchical priorities separate specific moral issues (e.g., does abortion require a
To continue...read the full-length post originally published on this site.
